Posts from the “milk” Category

Many of you know that some of the most delicious cheeses in the world can also smell the most, well, revolting. Indeed, cheese making and aging is a process of “controlled spoilage”, and it makes evolutionary sense that we’d be turned off when faced with something rotten.

It was Leon-Paul Fargue, a French surrealist poet, who described Camembert cheese as “les pieds de Dieu” – “the feet of God”. I love this characterization- it simultaneously highlights the divine sensation of eating this great cheese and the disgusting smell it produces. And even more, it brings up a truism that scientists are only beginning to explore- the correlation between stinky cheese and the body.

The other day I stumbled upon this New York Times article featuring a farmer and his 230 ‘happy’ cows. How does the author prove that they’re happy? They each have names. It reminded me of a conversation I had last week with my co-worker Laetitia. We were driving up to the Alpage (higher in altitude where the cows are kept during the summer) and talking about, you know, cow stuff. I was telling her about the huge dairy farms we have in the US and she said “Oh, I’ve heard about that. I heard that on some of the farms, the cows don’t even have names”.

Last weekend I hosted a couch surfer from Hong Kong named Jody. She was everything I’d hoped for in a couch surfer; she was friendly, open-minded, curious, and she loved talking about food. She also brought some Hong Kong-style powdered milk tea, which we sipped on while discussing everything from sachertorte to uralic linguistics to the Ryugyong Hotel. It was great.